5 suggestions to avoid "Armchair Teacher Education"

Armchair teacher education is a process and act of affiliating oneself as a teacher educator while sitting in an office and producing only theoretical work or work that has no relevance to practice. Armchair teacher educators write about what teachers do, without observing, exploring, and taking part in the performance and craft of teaching and learning in schools or other formal and informal learning environments. Armchair teacher education is a product of failed policies in various countries, in which the gap between schools and universities has widened to the extent that the teacher educators rarely see or talk to teachers. Some armchair teacher educators do not perform any kind of teaching even at the universities where they work. Armchair teacher education thus fails to address the needs of initial teacher education and student-teachers. The damage to student-teachers gets worse in countries where practicum is not integrated well into teacher education curricula.

Here are 5 tips for decision makers to minimize armchair teacher education and facilitate change:

1. Increase guided practice time for student-teachers throughout the curricula and create practice-based research initiatives for school-mentor / university-based teacher-educator collaboration

2. Identify and support (the training of) emerging mentors and involve university-based teacher-educators to the process

3. Create initiatives to support classroom-based research and encourage classroom interaction research that shows what actually happens in teaching and learning environments

4. Create sustainable university-school collaborations that mutually address the needs of schools as well as teacher education programmes at universities

5. Support research that explores teaching and learning practices in detail, not just research that “claims” innovation

You can read my full article on armchair teacher education here.

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